7.5 HIGH
- CVSS version (CVSS): 3.0
- Attack Vector (AV): Network (N)
- Attack Complexity (AC): Low (L)
- Privileges Required (PR): None (N)
- User Interaction (UI): None (N)
- Scope (S): Unchanged (U)
- Confidentiality (C): High (H)
- Integrity (I): None (N)
- Availability (A): None (N)
- Modified Attack Vector (MAV): Network (N)
- Modified Attack Complexity (MAC): Low (L)
- Modified Privileges Required (MPR): None (N)
- Modified User Interaction (MUI): None (N)
- Modified Confidentiality (MC): High (H)
- Modified Scope (MS): Unchanged (U)
- Modified Integrity (MI): None (N)
- Modified Availability (MA): None (N)
Activity log
- Created & dismissed (no matching packages found) suggestion
Path Traversal via Percent-Encoding in nltk.data.find() and nltk.data.load()
NLTK version 3.9.4 is vulnerable to a path traversal attack due to an incomplete fix for GitHub Issue #3504. The `_UNSAFE_NO_PROTOCOL_RE` regex in `nltk/data.py` checks for literal `../` sequences but fails to account for percent-encoded traversal sequences such as `..%2f`. The `url2pathname()` function decodes these sequences after the validation step, allowing an attacker to bypass the protection. This vulnerability enables an attacker to read arbitrary files accessible to the Python process by controlling the resource name parameter passed to `nltk.data.load()` or `nltk.data.find()`. The issue affects applications that rely on NLTK for resource loading, including NLP web applications, Jupyter notebooks, and CLI tools. The default `pathsec.ENFORCE=False` setting exacerbates the impact by not blocking the file read at the `open()` stage.
References
Affected products
- =<latest